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Tag: michael petrilli

A favorite refrain of Common Core advocates is that their opponents are peddling “misinformation.” Well Core fans are quite adept at doing the same thing, and as a new Washington Post article reinforces, no case of this is more egregious than pretending that Core adoption was supposed to be “state-led” and “voluntary,” and federal coercion was just unwanted Obama administration interference. That is simply not true: Core crusaders wanted federal involvement from before the Common Core was even given its name.

On numerous occasions I have cited the 2008 report Benchmarking for Success, from the Core-creating National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, as indisputable evidence that Core supporters wanted federal pressure to push state adoption of common, internationally benchmarked standards. That report – written before there was an Obama administration – says explicitly that Washington should “offer funds” and provide “tiered incentives” to push states onto common standards. It was a call reiterated on the website of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, though it was eventually removed.

Despite this crystal clear evidence, Core defenders have continued to imply that federal intervention has all been the unwanted, unappreciated pushiness of President Obama. Indeed, just last Friday, Michael Petrilli of the Core-supporting Thomas B. Fordham Foundation said it again in a discussion with AEI’s Mike McShane. Go to the 28:50 mark to hear Petrilli say, “I think many of us could make the argument that this whole thing would have played out very differently if the Obama administration had just stayed out of it.” And Petrilli is not alone in suggesting that the Core initiative was always supposed to be fed-free. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin (R), signing a bill removing her state from the Core last week, implied the same thing, saying:

Unfortunately, federal overreach has tainted Common Core. President Obama and Washington bureaucrats have usurped Common Core in an attempt to influence state education standards. The results are predictable. What should have been a bipartisan policy is now widely regarded as the president’s plan to establish federal control of curricula, testing and teaching strategies.

Obviously, based on Benchmarking for Success alone, this is utterly misleading. But what the Washington Posthas now reported, in a piece largely about the role of Bill Gates in pushing the Core, is that Core supporters not only suggested that there be federal incentives, they worked with the Obama administration to get them:

Duncan and his team leveraged stimulus money to reward states that adopted common standards.

They created Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion contest for education grants. Under the contest rules, states that adopted high standards stood the best chance of winning. It was a clever way around federal laws that prohibit Washington from interfering in what takes place in classrooms. It was also a tantalizing incentive for cash-strapped states.

Heading the effort for Duncan was Joanne Weiss, previously the chief operating officer of the Gates-backed NewSchools Venture Fund.

As Race to the Top was being drafted, the administration and the Gates-led effort were in close coordination.

Note that the article goes on to say that an early draft of RTTT mentioned the Core by name, but supporters objected that that would be too much for some states to handle. Instead, in contrast to what the article suggests, to be fully competitive for grants the regulations required adoption of standards common to a “majority” of states – not just “high” standards – a parameter that only included Common Core.

Now, I don’t think this will happen, but at this point it would at least clear the air for Core supporters to openly admit that they always wanted to employ federal pressure, and gladly worked with President Obama to get it. At the very least, it would make their own accusations of “misinformation” a little more tolerable.

A couple of days ago Florida governor Rick Scott declared that he wanted to reexamine state implementation of the Core and withdraw from the PARCC assessment consortium, one of two national groups the federal government funded to create Core-aligned tests. Though hardly a complete withdrawal from the Core, the move is huge. Why? Because arguably the biggest, most influential backer of the Common Core is former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and his own state, and a governor of his own party, bucked him. Florida is also, well, a pretty big state. Not surprisingly, now two more GOP governors – Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin – are signaling desires to unbuckle their states from the Core.

What happened that caused this suddenly powerful – and at least to me, unexpected – revolt? It is almost certainly that the Core is now reaching the district and school level, and parents and citizens are becoming fully aware of standards most of their states adopted lightning fast in 2010 to get federal Race to the Top money. They’re becoming aware, and either don’t like what they see in the standards, or don’t like federal imposition. They may also be getting increasingly sick of being told that the federal government wasn’t a driving force behind Core adoption when it absolutely was, and being called ignorant or unhinged for pointing out reality.

At this point I don’t want to write another word about Common Core supporters’ cheaprhetoricaltactics. Unfortunately, a new op-ed by Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation demands it. And this after AEI’s Rick Hess took Core defenders to task for their excesses, then kindly offered some helpful advice on how to at least have an honest conversation. Why didn’t the Fordham folks listen to Rick? Coulda saved me a lot of trouble.

Anyway, four things particularly stick out in Fordham’s piece, published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, though many others are dubious:

The piece starts off by, essentially, smearing all opponents of the Core as carpet-bagging liars. The very first line reads: “For some time now, outside groups have been vigorously spreading misinformation about the Common Core state standards.” The goal here is, presumably, to declare opponents devious right off the bat, and compound that by asserting that they are all icky non-Wisconsinites. Never mind that Finn and Petrilli, to my knowledge, aren’t from the Badger State, and have definitely lived in the Washington, DC, area for years.

A major complaint of Core supporters is that critics blame things like data-mining and curricular control on the Core which aren’t, technically, in it. They are intimately connected through Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind waivers, which intentionally place the Core in broader pushes for evaluation, data collection, etc., but no, they aren’t actually in the Core. It is apparently fine, though, to proclaim that the Core by itself “demands accountability, high standards and testing,” as Finn and Petrilli do. The difference, of course, is that Finn and Petrilli favor the Common Core, and the Common Core is great!

Finn and Petrilli offer a tiny, non-concession concession to people who have decried the massive federal coercion that drove Core adoption, noting that “many conservatives are justifiably angry about the inappropriate role the Obama administration has played in promoting and taking credit for these standards.” But the thing is, Obama didn’t just promote and take credit for the Common Core. He implemented concrete federal policies that essentially told states that if they didn’t adopt Common Core they couldn’t get part of a $4.35 billion pot of money, and it would be harder to get out of the absurd demands of No Child Left Behind. If Finn and Petrilli want to be forthright, they need to actually write the words “Race to the Top” and “waivers,” and explain exactly what they did. But they don’t even mention them!

Finally, it is simply wrong to suggest that the Obama administration went all lone wolf on Core supporters. Why? Because, as I have discussedrepeatedly, the report Benchmarking for Success, from the groups that created Common Core, came out in 2008 – before there was an Obama administration – and called on the federal government to “incentivize” adoption of common standards. In other words, they wanted the Feds to twist arms all along!

I hate it when Common Core supporters – from Wisconsin, DC, or anywhere else – misinform the public. Especially when their first move is to drop the deceiver card on their opponents.

The good news: Supporters haven’t been able to completely stamp out debate over national curriculum standards. The bad news: The Invasion of the School Snatchers strategy is real, and it is working!

Yesterday, I blogged about a letter from Jeb Bush reportedly causing a subcommittee of the American Legislative Exchange Council to table model legislation opposing national standards. Subsequent to my writing that, a follow-up Education Week post reported that debate wasn’t, in fact, quashed by Bush’s letter. Unfortunately, it appears consideration was postponed for another reason: Most state legislators have no idea what’s going on with national standards:

“Legislators have heard of it, but not a whole lot of states engage legislators in discussion of the common core,” said [John Locke Foundation education analyst Terry] Stoops, who describes himself as a common-core opponent. “Some wanted to know more about it, because state education agencies or state boards of education didn’t give them much information, if any, on the common core.”

If this is accurate, it confirms exactly what I’ve been saying for months: Despite being told that the national standards drive is “state-led,” the people’s representatives have been frozen out of it. Worse, it suggests that national-standardizers’ strategy of sneaking standards in is working.

Adding to confirmation of this school-snatcher strategy is a recent blog post from the Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli. At first I was heartened: Petrilli, a flag officer in the national standards campaign, was renouncing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s intent to make national-standards adoption a requirement to get waivers from No Child Left Behind. Perhaps, I thought, I’d gotten my first taker in the Demand Real Voluntarism Challenge. But then it sank in: Petrilli wasn’t demanding that Washington stop perpetuating the voluntarism sham. No, he was afraid something as un-stealthy as high-profile waiver demands would suddenly direct much-unwanted attention to the school-snatcher invasion:

The only possible outcome of Secretary Duncan putting more federal pressure on the states to adopt the Common Core is [to] stoke the fires of conservative backlash–and to lose many of the states that have already signed on.

Hopefully that is exactly what will happen, and both the unconstitutional waivers, and the snatchers strategy, will get all the negative attention they deserve.

It’s hard to pin down what’s more frustrating about Michael Petrilli’s response to my recent NRO op-ed on national standards: the rhetorical obfuscation about what Fordham and other national-standardizers really want, or the grade-school effort to escape discipline by saying that, hey, some kids are even worse!

Let’s start with the source of aggravation that by now must seem very old to regular Cato@Liberty readers, but that has to be constantly revisited because national standardizers are so darned disciplined about their message: The national-standards drive is absolutely not “state led and voluntary,” and by all indications this is totally intentional. Federal arm-twisting hasn’t just been the result of ”unforced errors,” as Petrilli suggests, but is part of a conscious strategy.

There was, of course, Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring Students Receive a World-class Education, the 2008 joint publication of Achieve, Inc., the National Governors Association, and the Council of Chief State School Officers that called for Washington to implement “tiered incentives” to push states to adopt “common core” standards. Once those organizations formed the Common Core State Standards Initiative they reissued that appeal while simultaneously — and laughably — stating that “the federal government has had no role in the development of the common core state standards and will not have a role in their implementation [italics added].”

Soon after formation of the CCSSI, the Obama administration created the “Race to the Top,” a $4.35-billion program that in accordance with the CCSSI’s request — as opposed to its hollow no-Feds “promise” — went ahead and required states to adopt national standards to be fully competitive for taxpayer dough.

The carnival of convenient contradiction has continued, and Fordham — despite Petrilli’s assertion that “nobody is proposing” that “federal funding” be linked “to state adoption of the common core standards and tests” — has been running it. Indeed, just like President Obama’s “blueprint” for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — better known as No Child Left Behind — Fordham’s ESEA “Briefing Book” proposes (see page 11) that states either adopt the Common Core or have some other federally sanctioned body certify a state’s standards as just as good in order to get federal money. So there would be an ”option” for states, but it would be six of one, half-dozen of the other, and the Feds would definitely link taxpayer dough to adoption of Common Core standards and tests.

Frankly, there’s probably no one who knows about these proposals who doesn’t think that the options exist exclusively to let national-standards proponents say the Feds wouldn’t technically “require” adoption of the Common Core. But even if the options were meaningful alternatives, does anyone think they wouldn’t be eliminated in subsequent legislation?

Of course, the problem is that most people don’t know what has actually been proposed — who outside of education-wonk circles has time to follow all of this? — which is what national-standards advocates are almost certainly counting on.

But suppose Fordham and company really don’t want federal compulsion? They could put concerns to rest by doing just one thing: loudly and publicly condemning all federal funding, incentivizing, or any other federal involvement whatsoever in national standards. Indeed, I proposed this a few months ago. And just a couple of weeks ago, Petrilli and Fordham President Chester Finn rejected that call, saying that they ”have no particular concern with the federal government … helping to pay” for the creation of curricular guides and other material and activities to go with national standards.

So, Fordham, you are proposing that federal funding be linked to adoption of common standards and tests, and denying it is becoming almost comical. At least, comical to people who are familiar with all of this. But as long as the public doesn’t know, the deception ends up being anything but funny.

Maybe, though, Fordham is getting nervous, at least over the possibility that engaged conservatives are on to them. Why do I think that? Because in addition to belching out the standard rhetorical smoke screen, Petrilli is now employing the’ “look over there — that guy’s really bad” gambit to get the heat off. Indeed, after ticking off some odious NCLB reauthorization proposals from other groups, Petrilli concludes his piece with the following appeal to lay off Fordham and go after people all conservatives can dislike:

We might never see eye to eye with all conservatives about national standards and tests. But we should be able to agree about reining in Washington’s involvement in other aspects of education. How about we drop the infighting and spend some of our energy working together on that?

Nice try, but sorry. While I can’t speak for conservatives, those of us at Cato who handle education have certainly addressed all sorts of problems with federal intervention in our schools. But right now in education there is no greater threat to the Constitution, nor our children’s learning, than the unprecedented, deception-drenched drive to empower the federal government to dictate curricular terms to every public school — and every public-school child — in America. And the harder you try to hide the truth, the more clear that becomes.

People are starting to fight back against the sneaky push for nationalized curricula, and folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are revealing their true colors in response.

Yesterday, Fordham President Chester Finn and Executive VP Michael Petrilli responded to the national standards “counter-manifesto” released on Monday, and they were none too happy with its signatories, accusing them of peddling “half truths, mischaracterizations, and straw men.” What seemed to aggravate them most of all was the assertion that “common” standards would lead to de facto federal curricula, something they say neither they nor their national-standards loving friends – including the Obama administration – want.

At this point, who’s buying this? True, it’s possible that Fordham and friends might really not want a federal curriculum – I can’t read minds – but the federal government through Race to the Top has already bribed states into adopting the Common Core standards; Washington is paying for the development of national tests; and the Obama administration’s “blueprint” for reauthorizing No Child Left Behind would make national standards the law’s accountability backbone. So even if you don’t want this to lead to a federal curriculum, that is exactly what you are going to get. If the feds use money taken from taxpayers to force states to adopt national standards and tests, and if Washington rewards or punishes states based on those tests, then you have a federal curriculum. I mean, if it walks like a duck…

The good news in Fordham’s response, perhaps, is that they appear to have responded to my challenge to loudly renounce any federal funding for national standards and related material if they really want this to be voluntary. Unfortunately, they’ve responded with a resounding “no”: Finn and Petrilli write that “we have no particular concern with the federal government…helping to pay” for the creation of curricular guides and other material and activities to go with national standards.

This happiness to keep the feds paying pretty much puts the final rip in the tissue-thin “voluntarism” ruse. But if you’re not satisfied with my analysis, try this post over at Jay Greene’s blog, in which Jay reproduces a terrific fill-in-the-blanks analysis of Fordham’s tricky prose by Charles Miller, former chair of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas and a very astute observer of education politics. Let’s just say, he writes what I suspect everyone who is familiar with the federal government – and Fordham – is thinking.

One last thing bears mentioning. In defense of Finn and Petrilli, they do get one thing right: they take a lot of the counter-manifesto signatories to task for having pushed hard for state-level centralization while decrying such top-down control at the federal level. Of course, Fordham ignores little things like “federalism” and the “Constitution” with this argument, but it is true that a government monopoly is likely to be dreadful whether at the state or national level. Then again, they don’t actually make that argument either, so they’re actually just trying to score lame hypocrisy points. And they follow that with this cheapest of shots at libertarians and, well, any Americans who would like to have control over what their children learn:

Some libertarian signers of the counter-manifesto may indeed believe that we should let schools, districts, and parents make every single educational decision no matter how irresponsible, hare-brained, or even harmful to kids.

Why, that’s exactly what libertarians think! When contemplating policy, we’ve given no consideration to whether individuals will overall make better decisions than special-interest dominated government, or looked at the empirical evidence that education is better the more decentralized control is, or considered the value of freedom in society, or anything like that. We’re just mindlessly wedded to liberty and don’t care who gets hurt.

At last, the leaders of the national-standards-driving Fordham Institute have demonstrated – if not fully said – exactly what they think. It is not a very comforting vision.

Yesterday, David Boaz riffed off of Michael Petrilli’s recent Wall Street Journal piece on the need for Republicans to stop denigrating well-educated, social-progressive types and make them feel welcome in the party. That is, make them feel welcome as long as they don’t try to impose their progressivism on everyone else through government.

That’s certainly good stuff — I’m all for making the GOP as libertarian as possible — but libertarianism extends far beyond just saying nice things about people who eat arugula or who own their own wind farms. Fundamentally, it means government leaving people alone in all facets of their lives as long as they aren’t inflicting harm on others.

Unfortunately, as Petrilli’s Thomas B. Fordham Foundation — perhaps the foremost neoconservative education think tank in the nation — has made clear for years, that’s definitely not something Petrilli and Co. are prepared to do.

Petrilli’s piece was a nice first step, but both he and the GOP still have a long way to go.